Back to Union Square
New Yorkers, a week later, craving humor.

September 19, 2001 8:30 a.m.

n early sliver of returning normality: the sound of car honking.

My trainer, a cubical young man from the Bahamas, told me about an ex-client. She, a thirtysomething woman, is doing hard time for having stolen three million dollars from her company, in increments over a number of years. She sits in some federal slammer, deep in upstate New York. He talked to her, post-attack, and she said, "I feel very safe."

There is little in the way of deliberate humor available, though it seems to me that New Yorkers are on the point of craving it. I discussed this problem with the maitre d' of a neighborhood restaurant, who is also a stand-up comic who is just beginning to succeed. His best answer was that after a hiatus, he and his tribe would have to feel their way, seeing what works, what falls flat. The temper of New Yorkers is naturally sardonic, which inhibits them now, for what is most out of place is wise-ass jeering. What can they tell, airline jokes?

A friend taking the Harlem line on the weekend, a commuter train that runs west of the Connecticut border, reported a common sight: cars parked in the lots in remote corners. No one would have left them there when the lot was practically empty. Ergo, they were parked when the lot was full — either after the attack, by hurrying firemen and rescue workers; or before it, by its victims.

A poet who lives half the time in Pennsylvania, and half the time in the city, came back after a week's absence, and felt a weight of guilt: Why hadn't she been here? Why hadn't she helped? To a lesser degree, these feelings operate within the city, depending on how close one was to the epicenter. A literary agent who works on the Upper East Side, but who lives near Wall Street (which was becoming a more residential neighborhood) was telling me all that the New Yorkers in the former place cannot know. Everyone has to understand that each has his station. Some people stayed on the Titanic, some made it into the lifeboats, others were in the ships that came to the rescue. They also serve who only stand and wait.

Tuesday night I revisited the scene at Union Square. The artist who had been out of town had just seen it for the first time, and was revolted. I had noticed, even without looking carefully, that it had metastasized. The circle of candles, flowers, and flags by the base of the impromptu statue had become half a dozen circles. Many of the flowers were plastic, or bouquets from delis, still left in their cellophane wrappers. The cheesy disorder recalled the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo, gone to a cemetery to visit a grave, grabs a bunch of wilted flowers from a grave nearby, and tosses it down on his. The artist also reported that the site was overrun by kooks and axe-grinders. This made sense: As life returns to some imitation of normal, normal people will go back to work, leaving the field to the possessed, who have so much free time.

I expected the worst, but did not find it. I went late at night, which helped. Darkness dimmed the tawdriness; the candles, shining in the darkness, looked their best. As on the first days, someone had laid long strips of paper, this time white, down the path on the east side of the park. People wrote and wrote, and while there was politics (a March Against the War in Washington, D.C. — was Kabul booked?), idiocy ("I believe man is not aggressive") and fanaticism ("Nam Myam Renghe Kyo" — the chant of some odd-ball Buddhist cult), there was much else. AMERICA'S SPIRIT STILL STANDS; below it, a message in Chinese (presumably the same one); below them, a picture of the Trade Towers. "I learned there isn't enough dust to cover our courage, our love, our spirit. This week, I became a true American — Jorge." "I used to think living for yourself was the best revenge; now I don't know what to think."

At the tip of the park the visual focus has moved from the new statue, the cement column, to the equestrian statue of Washington, which has been strangely transmogrified. Modeled on a classical statue of Marcus Aurelius, one guidebook describes it as "an essay in quiet grandeur." Now it sprouts four flags, three American, one a banner with a peace sign. Someone has chalked a peace sign on the horse's haunch. But someone else put a huge color poster of the World Trade Towers on the front of the granite base; above that is a white and black sticker, WE WILL PREVAIL.

In front of the statue, a camp-counselor type was encouraging people, mostly kids, to hold hands. "Everybody hold hands! Everybody hold hands!" he repeated. "Not if you don't want to," someone else cried: stubbornness supplying the voice of good sense.

I could see how demagogues meet their payrolls. Most people are terrible at public display — timid, confused, boring. Many are adequate — they say what's on their minds, but not in any memorable fashion. Someone who can speak arrestingly and to the point can be like a wolf among sheep at moments such as this.

There haven't been any such in New York, thank God and the murmuring, mostly good-natured crowd will lurch on, until stress refines it further.